As all good golfers know, less is often more. Might the same be true when it comes to financial reporting? The page count inflation of company reporting over the past two decades has been staggering. Back in the mid-1990s the typical report and account was fewer than 100 pages; this spring’s annual report season saw most major companies publish weighty tomes, often more than 250 pages.

所有优秀的高尔夫球手都知道，常常少即是多。对财务报告而言，或许也是这样？过去20年里，公司财务报告的页数膨胀得惊人。回到1990年代，典型的公司财报都不到100页；而在今春的年报季，多数大公司都发布了大部头的财报，页数经常超过250页。

Putting aside the environmental damage from tree felling or the resulting back conditions afflicting an army of postal workers, has all this extra disclosure actually helped stakeholders better understand the businesses? Does more disclosure reflect a genuinely more complicated world, does it merely reveal the complexities that were always there, or is it simply the regulatory and accounting world gone mad?

所有这些额外披露除了造成更多的树木砍伐并破坏环境，以及给很多邮政工人带来背痛困扰以外，实际上有助于利益相关者更好地了解公司吗？更多的披露是反映出了一个真正变得更复杂的世界，还是只是反映了一直存在的复杂性，抑或仅仅表明监管和会计界失去了理智？

Perhaps the greatest champion of this “disclosure explosion” are banks. For example, 25 years ago Deutsche Bank’s annual report was under 100 pages (including two pages dedicated to their art collection). Of course banks today are big and complicated, and so one might expect their disclosure to also be big and complicated. Yet with Deutsche’s 2015 annual report running to more than 600 pages, it is right to ask whether such volume is helping or hindering stakeholders to understand what’s going on. And not only are there lots of words; any reader not familiar with AFS, CDR, CPR, CVA, DRE, DVA, EAD, FVA, IMM, LCR, LGD, MREL, NQH, NSFR, SFT, SNLP or TLAC (just to choose a few examples) will struggle to comprehend many of the issues.

或许，这一“披露爆炸”的最大冠军是银行。例如，25年前，德银(Deutsche Bank)的年报不到100页（其中两页专门介绍公司的艺术品收藏）。当然，如今的银行既庞大又复杂，所以，人们可能会预期它们的披露也要多而复杂。不过，德银2015年年报超过了600页，我们有理由问一问，这样的大部头到底是有助于还是阻碍利益相关者了解德银的现状？年报不但是字数多；而且，任何不熟悉可供出售资产(AFS)、中国存托凭证(CDR)、有条件提前还款率(CPR)、现金增加值(CVA)、存款利率弹性(DRE)、债务估值调整(DVA)、违约风险敞口(EAD)、融资价值调整(FVA)、内部模型法(IMM)、流动性覆盖率(LCR)、违约损失率(LGD)、合格债务最低要求(MREL)、净稳定资金比率(NSFR)、证券融资交易(SFT)、压力净流动性头寸(SNLP)或者总损失吸收能力(TLAC)（这里只举几个例子）的读者，将很难理解年报中的许多问题。

This matters. With the regulatory rules for banks in an endless state of flux and lurking fears of massive litigation, shareholders already have enough excuses to consider banks “uninvestable”. If attending a speed reading course and acquiring a degree in acronyms are also required to understand what they report, then many investors may conclude that their time is better spent assessing companies in more comprehensible industries. That makes it harder and more expensive for banks to raise capital, which for Europe — with its heavy reliance on bank lending — is bad news.

这很重要。由于银行业监管规则没完没了的变化，以及对大规模诉讼的潜在担忧，股东们已有足够的理由认为银行“不值得投资”。如果想要读懂银行报告，还需要参加速读班并拿一个首字母缩略词方面的学位的话，那么许多投资者或许会认为，他们还不如花时间去评估那些更易理解的行业的公司。这会提高银行融资的难度和成本。对于严重依赖银行贷款的欧洲而言，这是个坏消息。

So what to do? The most obvious thing is to cut down disclosure. Regulators, accountants and banks should not be shy about binning useless stuff. Prioritising what matters is equally important, as advocated by the Financial Stability Board’s enhanced disclosure task force and by the recent banking futures report.

那怎么办呢？最显而易见的是减少披露内容。监管者、会计师和银行不应羞于砍掉无用内容。优先披露重要事项同样重要，金融稳定委员会(FSB)的加强披露特别小组和最近的未来银行业报告就如此倡导。

More radical, yet more relevant, disclosures would help, such as details of what topics were discussed and when by the board over the year or comparisons of the performance against budget.

更激进、但更切中要害的信息披露将对投资者有用，比如披露过去一年里，董事会于何时讨论了哪些议题的细节，或者业绩与预算的对照细节。

While insiders may protest that the complexity and opacity of the reporting simply mirrors the real world of banking, such thinking lacks imagination. With most banks’ stock market valuations below their book value, the industry needs to embrace, not resist, radical ideas that might help investors understand what they are being asked to invest in.

尽管内部人士或许会抗议称，报告的复杂与不透明仅仅反映了真实的银行世界，但这种想法缺乏想象力。现在多数银行的市值低于账面价值，因此银行业需要拥抱而不是抵制激进的想法，这些想法可能有助于投资者理解被邀请投资的对象。

When I started working in the City 25 years ago as an analyst, before emails and before the internet, a key part of the job on the day a bank reported its results was calling its shareholders and telling them the actual numbers, since the sole electronic delivery mechanism was an expensive stock exchange news feed that only the investment banks could afford. Today, while all 600 pages of Deutsche Bank’s results are disclosed instantaneously to everyone, the volume, complexity and lazy reliance on jargon and acronyms means that the analyst job has once again become one of simply communicating the numbers to the owners. As a result many are left asking the same question as their predecessors did a quarter of a century ago: “How much money did the bank actually make?”

当25年前我开始在伦敦金融城做分析师的时候，电子邮件和互联网尚未风行，每逢一家银行的业绩报告日，我的一项重要工作是给其股东打电话把具体的数字告诉他们，因为唯一的电子信息传送机制是只有投行能用得起的一种昂贵的股票交易所新闻推送。如今，尽管德银全部600页的财报是同时披露给所有人的，但报告的厚度、复杂性以及对术语和首字母缩略词的懒惰依赖意味着，分析师的工作再次变成把数字直接告诉给股东了。结果，许多投资者不得不问他们的前辈们在四分之一世纪之前问的问题：“这家银行到底赚了多少钱？”